[Mailman-Users] Migrating and Upgrading

[Mark Sapiro]

Dave Warchol wrote:
> 
>One method I have considered would be "brute force" (a little labor intensive, a little heavier on the downtime, but doable):
>- dumping the metadata from the old lists (configuration, members, etc.)
>- bring the old server down
>- bring the new server up with the same name/IP
>- manually create the new lists
>- import the members for each list
>The only unknown is how to move the archives.
> 
>Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


Too hard.

Do not manully create the old lists on the new server. This is
important.

Copy/backup the lists/<listname>/config.db files from the old machine
and copy/restore them to the new server. There must not be an existing
lists/<listname>/config.pck on the new server at this step. If there
is because you created the list on the new server, remove the
config.pck leaving only the config.db.

Archives can be moved by either moving the entire archives/private/
tree or by moving just the
archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox file and running
'bin/arch --wipe <listname>' for each list. If you do the latter, it
is a good idea to first check the .mbox files with bin/cleanarch.

Mailman will automatically update the config.db info (list config,
membership, options, etc.) and save a current format config.pck as
each list is accessed. You can force this for all lists by just
running bin/list_lists. Once the lists are converted and there are
config.pck and config.pck.last files, remove the old config.db or you
run the risk at some future time of falling back to the config.db if
the config.pck* files become corrupted.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan